


Some say the world will end in fire

by Dissenter



Series: Cry havoc [2]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Guerrilla Warfare, Historical References, Mafia Politics, War, Women In Power, World War II, aftermath of war, bamf Daniela, implied/referenced assassination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-14
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-15 02:17:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11796369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dissenter/pseuds/Dissenter
Summary: The war is won, more or less, and now leaders forged in war have to learn what comes next





	Some say the world will end in fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Night-Mare (Aoife)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aoife/gifts).



> It happened again. This time, meet Cavallone Settima, who is probably even more terrifying than Daniela. On the basis that given the facists were going around killing off all the male mafioso's it might not just be the vongola that ended up under female leadership.

Cavallone Settima lay sprawled out over the red armchair, a glass of wine in her hand, relaxed, at rest if not entirely calm. They were in Daniela’s study holding civilised conversations about war, and murder. It was as close to domestic as the two of them were capable of being, and in that moment it was almost possible to forget Cavallone was mad.

Almost but not quite, not with the rage that danced in Tiberia Cavallone’s eyes. Or maybe it wasn’t that Tiberia was mad. That would in some ways be too simple. It was that she was forged in war, in fire, and bloodshed, and grief, forged with sharp edges on every side. In some ways that is as true of Daniella as it is of Tiberia, and sometimes Daniella can’t help but wonder if they are capable of anything but war. War has made them, war has defined them, they may well be lost without it.

Tiberia stretched, a study in lethal power that wasn’t quite beauty, but was compelling enough it didn’t matter. More than one man had died trying to get too close to that flame. She stretched slowly and then she spoke, as softly as she always did. Cavallone Settima was not someone who needed to raise her voice to have people listen. Not anymore.

“We’ll have to kill him of course.” Daniela didn’t disagree. It made sense, the man was a loose end, a potential rallying point for the enemy. But of course it was about more than that, it was about blood, and honour, too many of her own, of Settima’s own, of those they owed love, and protection, and vengeance had died because of him. Letting him live was unthinkable… but…

“We cannot let it be known we did it.” Because they were criminals, and the assassination of a Head of State, no matter how hated, would draw far too much of the wrong kind of attention. Settima shrugged, uncaring, but didn’t argue. Daniela was still the Vongola, and Tiberia respected her decisions.

“You suggest?” She asked, taking another sip of her wine.

“Political elements would probably be best. They’re less likely to care about our motives or involvement. And of course they’d only be too happy to take full credit.” That was the major difference between proper criminals and terrorists really. If a criminal was doing their job right no-one would ever know they were involved, with terrorist on the other hand the whole _point_ was that everyone knew you were involved, and why. Tiberia nodded slightly in agreement.

“As long as he dies I don’t really care.” Her voice was totally flat, neutral, but Daniela knew all too well that her mood could shift to murderous rage within a heartbeat if one of her myriad invisible triggers was tripped. There was a lot of Wrath in Tiberia’s Sky, nearly as much as there was Sorrow in Daniela’s, and this war had stripped away any veneer of civilisation from the pure animal survival instinct that powered flames.

They had all lost too much to be quite sane, Daniela supposed. But Tiberia worried her more than most. On a war footing she was functional, but in peacetime?

There were too many female bosses in this generation. Not that female bosses were a bad thing. Often they were more competent than their brothers or fathers had ever been. The issue was not in their competency, but in what their ascension _meant._ The sucession laws of most famiglias were such that a female boss could mean only one thing. That all their male kin were dead. It meant too many dead fathers and brothers, and uncles, and cousins, it meant too many of their own, dead, or jailed, or conscripted into their enemy’s war. It meant more grief than Daniela had tears to shed, and she remembered her old mist tutor telling her she was a Sky of Sorrows, and she knew the price was too high.

Because for all Daniela may have resented the way her father chose her younger brothers over her, named them heir before her in spite of the force of her will, the breadth of her Sky, the ruthless competence that her brother’s had never been able to match, they were her _family_ , and she loved them more than the world itself. She might have wanted the Vongola, but not at that cost, not at the price of their lives. She would make the fascists _pay_ for what they had done to her, and hers. They left the women alive because they underestimated them, thought they were weak, didn’t see them as a threat. Daniela taught them to regret that assumption.

She wasn’t sure how Tiberia felt about it, about the loss of her male kin. After all, for all the cousins and uncles the fascists had stolen from her, her father had died at her own hands. She’d killed him for her brother’s sake, her little brother, eight years old now. Because her father had been too weak, too weak and too indecisive, to hold the family together in the face of war, and if the family fell the boy would have died. So she had challenged her father for leadership, and killed him in the sucession battle with Sky Flames tinged red with fury and put on his ring still stained in blood.

Tiberia had spoken about it sometimes, when she’d drunk too much wine to keep secrets and not enough to drown her sorrows. She’d spoken about trying to support her father, trying to advise him, trying to push him into doing what needed to be done. About speaking softly and being ignored as disaster after disaster fell upon her family. About _rage,_ and helplessness, and not being allowed to _do_ anything because she was a princess, not an heir or a soldier.

Now when Tiberia spoke softly people listened. Her brother had been sent to America, sent into hiding while his older sister fought a war, and won. Because they had won, and maybe it was cold comfort after so much grief, so many dead, but they had won, and they were discussing the murder of the man who… well he wasn’t responsible for everything, no one man ever is, but he led it, and he represented it, and he was a vital part of it, and that made him as responsible as anyone. They had victory, and revenge, and hope for the future, and Daniela didn’t _know_ how Tiberia felt about the price for that victory.

And in the wake of victory peace. She didn’t know how Tiberia felt about peace either. Which was just an easier way of saying she didn’t know how _she_ felt about peace. Because she’d hated the war, for those she’d lost, and the misery it brought, and the way she could never, ever let her guard down. But at the same time there was a burning bright shameful part of her that had _loved_ the war, loved knowing there was an enemy to hate, loved the challenge, and the strategy, and the danger of it, loved the dark awful knowledge that she was _good_ at it. She had met her guardians all but one in the years since the war began, and without it she didn’t know what they were to her, what she was to them. They were _hers_ of course, and she was theirs, but what that meant, when battle gave way to diplomacy, and espionage, to business, she didn’t know. She didn’t know how to rule in peacetime.

But then she hadn’t known how to rule in war either. Her brothers had been given bosses’ training, she hadn’t. But she’d managed anyway, got by on intuition, and ruthlessness, and talent. And if she had to learn it all over again in peacetime then so be it, because until she got round to producing an heir, she was the only choice the family had.

Fuck, there was another thing. She needed an heir. She should have one already, and if she were a man she would have paid a prostitute to carry her child the moment her father had died, for the sake of securing the sucession. But she was not a man, and during the war she was in combat often enough that a pregnancy had been more than unwise. It had been a decent enough excuse to put it off. But now the war was over and she’d have to find someone with strong flames and no strings attached to sire a child on her. Not an easy task even before the actual process of having a child was considered. Maybe she should just ask one of her guardians, they at least would have no hidden agendas, would be unquestionably loyal to her. She was a little jealous of Tiberia, not having to worry about that issue. Then again it was probably for the best that she already had an heir in her little brother. Daniela couldn’t imagine Settima Cavallone “the flesh eating Mare of Diomedes”, allowing herself to be covered by any man.

Peacetime concerns, in their own way every bit as difficult as wartime ones. But she had her family, and her own, and she did not live through a war only to break when it ended. She would have a child, and rebuild her operations, and learn the rules of running a family when fighting wasn’t the primary concern. She was the Vongola Ottava, and maybe she wasn’t meant to be the Boss, but she was better at it than her father or her brothers could ever have been.

And for now she had the evening free to spend with Tiberia, and whatever problems she had were just more fodder for discussion with the person closest in the world to being her equal. This was no time to wear herself out worrying about the demands of the future. For one thing, Tiberia had little patience for overthinking when there were more interesting things to do or talk about.

**Author's Note:**

> They might be sleeping together, they might just be friends. I'll leave that to the reader's imagination.  
> Yes Tiberia has wrath flames, I figure some people must have had them in between Riccardo and Xanxus, but probably not Vongola.  
> And yes they are indeed plotting to kill Mussolini, probably in collaboration with communist rebels. The war is mostly won, and he's an unpleasant loose end.
> 
> Incidentally, Tiberia's little brother comes home with a cowboy obsession that lingers for generations to come.


End file.
